31 December 2015

The first indie highlight of 2015 for me was the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen.
I went this year because they featured
a retrospective of the career of experimental filmmaker Takashi
Itō, who is renowned for his innovative use of stop motion. I also got a chance to meet the artist /
filmmaker Isao Yamada and enjoy the work of
many Japanese artists whose work was in the official competitions including Tochka’s PiKA PiKA animation Track
(2015), Yoriko Mizushiri’s latest minimalist
work Veil (2014), and up-and-coming
young animator Chihiro Satō’s hand
drawn animated short Satō no Chihiro
(2014). Akira Tochigi of the National Film Center in Tokyo presented a selection of films by pioneering amateur filmmakers such as Shigeji Ogino and Kurenai Mori (learn more).

In the archives of the Oberhausen festival I was also finally able to
watch Ryō Hirano’s Paradise (2013), which was much praised
by animation professionals in 2014. I
didn’t include Paradise in my list
last year because I had not seen the film yet.
For those of you new to Nishikata Film
Review, this list always includes some films from the previous 2 years
because I live in Europe. Unless an
artist has sent me their work or it is available online, I don’t see it until it comes to a festival near
me. That means that Ryo Ōkawara’s latest film Sugar Lump (ディスイズマイハウス,
2015) has not made this list – it makes its European premiere at Clermont-Ferrand Short
Film Festival 2016 in February. I am
a huge fan of Ōkawara’s previous work (Wind Egg,
Animal
Dance) so I am looking forward to seeing Sugar Lump sometime in 2016.

The other
big highlight of my animation year was Nippon Connection, where my guest was
the animator Yūichi Itō (i.toon / Geidai). My children enjoyed his workshop very much
and it was wonderful learn more about this multi-talented artist. Our other guest was Yuki Hayashi, whose music video for Moskitoo Fragments of Journey (2014) featured in the programme that I
curated called Everything
Visible. Nippon Connection 2015 also
featured innovative works such as Sleep
Tight My Baby, Cradled in the Sky (ねむれ思い子 空のしとねに, 2014) by Naoya Kurisu and Taxi Driver Gion Taro THE MOVIE – To All You Deserted Dudes (タクシードライバー祗園太郎 THE MOVIE すべての葛野郎に捧ぐ,
2014) by Munenori Nagano. Taxi
Driver Gion Taro (see
trailer) is not really an animation, but a puppet drama made with paper
cutout figures. This was a nice tie-in
with this year’s JVTA sponsored
film: Ichikawa Kon’s Shisengumi (新選組, 2000),
which was also made with paper cutouts.

The following list is in no particular order. Each has something interesting or unique that
caught my attention this year. Where
possible, I have included links to official websites and places to see the
film.

09 October 2015

The port
town of Otaru on Ishikari Bay is a popular tourist destination in Hokkaido because
of its unique 1920s canal with its picturesque Victorian-style gaslights. However, a stone’s throw away from the tourist
traps are average communities of working and middle class people, many of whom
commute into nearby Sapporo for work.
While we do get glimpses of Otaru’s famous port as the backdrop of Mipo Oh’s latest feature film Being Good (きみはいい子 / Kimi wa ii ko, 2015), the director focuses her camera intently on the
lives of the common people of Otaru.

Being Good is an adaptation of the bestselling
book of the same by Hatsue Nakawai (中脇初枝, b. 1974). The
original book is a collection of five short stories set in the same town that
are linked by the themes of abuse and people dealing with mental illness. Oh has taken three of these stories, “Santa no konai ie” (The House that Santa
does not Visit), “Beppin-san” (Pretty Girl), and “Konnichi wa, sayonara”
(Hello, Good-bye) and interweaves them in one Otaru neighbourhood. It’s a familiar
setting which really could be found in any town in Hokkaido.

The “Santa no konai ie” thread tells the
story of rookie elementary school teacher Tasuku Okano (Kengo Kora) who is struggling both to keep discipline in his rowdy
classroom and to deal with difficult parents. He soon starts to suspect that a troubled child
in his class may be suffering neglect and even abuse at home. His efforts to help the boy are consistently thwarted
but he continues to look for a solution.

Meanwhile, Masami
(Machiko Ono) of the “Beppin-san”
story is struggling to look after her 3-year-old daughter Ayane on her own
because her husband is away on long business trips abroad. Her isolation is compounded by the fact that she
was abused as a child and her frustration erupts in violence towards
Ayane. She tries to hide her nasty
secret from the mothers she meets with at the playground, but one of the moms (Chizuru Ikewaki) is more perceptive and
understanding than she could ever imagine.

Another lonely woman in the neighbourhood is the
elderly home owner Kazumi (Michie Kita)
who never married. She is known locally
as suffering from mild dementia, which sometimes leads her into difficult
situations such as when a supermarket employee, Mrs. Sakurai (Yasuko Tomita), catches Kazumi unintentionally
shoplifting. One day Kazumi finds that
an autistic boy (Amon Kabe) who
always greets her with “Konnichi wa, sayonara” is in a panic because he has
lost his house key. Kazumi invites him
into her home and he reminds her of the younger brother she lost during the firebombing
of Tokyo. By chance, his mother turns
out to be the supermarket employee who is shocked to discover that this woman
she thought was crazy actually is full of a wisdom and love beyond anything she
has experienced from the “normal” members of her community. She begins to realize that she has been focusing too strongly on her son’s tics instead of recognizing the goodness in
him.

I saw the EU
premiere of this film at Camera Japan 2015
in Rotterdam. The film is not an easy
one to watch, especially for people who have experienced or witnessed abuse in
their own lives. I gave a talk on
Japanese Women Behind the Scenes immediately after this screening and found
that many audience members were still reeling from the disturbing abuse
depicted or suggested by the film. I say
“suggested” because Oh is careful not to show the worst of the abuse on screen
by having the girl’s body blocked by her mother’s body shot from behind;
however, this doesn’t not really lessen the emotional impact of the
scenes. The sound of the violence and of
the child screaming are traumatic. As
are the evidence of bruises on her skin afterwards. The performance of the children in this film
are truly amazing to behold and if I ever have a chance to interview Mipo Oh I
would ask her about how she worked with the child actors. It must have taken a great deal of sensitivity
in order to get these heartbreakingly realistic performances from them.

There are no
easy answers or real happy endings in this film. In fact, many of the key issues remain
frustratingly unresolved. While many
audience members that I chatted with said they felt deeply disturbed by the
child abuse scenes, I believe that these were very realistically portrayed stories
that need to be told. Unfortunately
abuse is much more common than we would like to believe and we need to educate
ourselves and not try to sweep it under the carpet. Being
Good imparts the message that we should connect with our neighbours and
communities so that people who need help know that there are people out there
who do care. As Okano’s sister tells
him, we need to treat our children well, so that world peace can become a
reality.

Mipo Oh (also written as Mipo O /呉美保, b. 1977) is third generation Korean-Japanese. She grew up in Mie prefecture and graduated from
Osaka University of Arts. She began her
career as a screenwriter to Nobuhiko Obayashi and went on to make commercials
and short films before directing her first feature in 2005. Her 2014 film The Light Only Shines There won her numerous awards at
international film festivals and was Japan's entry for the Academy Award for
Best Foreign Film. Most recently, Being
Good won the NETPAC Jury Prize at the Moscow
International Film Festival 2015 for “being seeing, insightful and
incredibly sincere.” Learn more about Oh’s
work at Japanese
Women Behind the Scenes.

The Scent of
Pheasant’s Eye: An Episode from the Tales of Flowers (1935)

乙女シリーズその一花物語福壽草

Shōjo shiriizu sono hito - hana monogatari
fukujusō

For their 10th
anniversary, Camera Japan Festival in
Rotterdam presented a benshi
performance with piano accompaniment of the rarely seen silent film The Scent of Pheasant’s Eye: An Episode from
the Tales of Flowers (乙女シリーズその一花物語福壽草 / Shōjo shiriizu
sono hito-hana monogatari fukujusō, 1935).
The revival of this film occurred in 2008/9 with screenings at the
National Film Center in Tokyo (2008), who has a 35mm print of the film, and at
the Tokyo
International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival (2009). Screenings of the film
have featured benshi performances by either
Midori Sawato or Ichiro Kataoka. The film’s first international screening is
believed to have been at the 2013 Pordenone Silent Film Festival.

The Story

The film is
based on a story found in Tales of
Flowers (花物語/Hana Monogatari,
1916-1924) by Nobuko Yoshiya (吉屋信子, 1896-1973).
The 52 stories of romantic female friendships in this collection
were very popular with female students of the day. Yoshiya was a prolific and commercially
successful writer who is considered a pioneer in lesbian literature. Her same-sex (dosei-ai) romances were considered acceptable because they depicted
lesbianism as a phase on the road to a culturally acceptable heterosexual
marriage.

The “pheasant’s
eye” of the title English common name of the flower fukujusō
(フクジュソウ / Adonis ramosa). In the original kanji it means luck (福/fuku), long
life (寿/ju), and herb(草/sō). It belongs to the family of flowers named
after mythological figure Adonis. In
East Asia, the fukujusō is a rare yellow
flower found mainly in central and northern Japan. In the context of this story, the flower is a
metaphor for the rare beauty of the young female protagonists. This is made clear by the opening quote from
Yoshiya herself: “I dedicate this to the lovely young flowers.”

The Scent of Pheasant’s Eye tells the
story of a high school girl called Kaoru Sakamoto who falls in love with her
sister-in-law Miyoko. Her crush actually
develops before she has even met her brother’s new wife. It is an arranged marriage and the "sisters" only
meet on the wedding day. A romantic
young girl, Kaoru and her friends are the kind of girls who would be likely to read
Nobuko Yoshiya’s novelsand
fantasize about their ideal romantic partner.
As the friendship blossoms between Kaoru and Miyoko, Kaoru grows jealous
of any affection Miyoko shows Kaoru’s brother.
Kaoru’s schoolmates and family act as foils for her moody
behaviour. The drama of any romance is
kept light with comedic moments such as the slapstick scene where the two young
ladies are being photographed together in nature and the photographer falls
into the water. The physical comedy in
the film shows the influence of the American silent greats like Buster Keaton,
Charlie Chaplin, and Harold Lloyd. The lesbian love affair is suggested via the
female gaze and evocative mise-en-scène,
but no direct dialogue. Miyoko is
equally flirtatious with her husband as she is with his sister, causing the latter
to indulge in jealous temper tantrums.

The Cast

Star billing
is given to Naomi Egawa in the role
of Kaoru Sakamoto. She gives a
melodramatic performance, putting on a hilarious “jealousy face” every time her
sister-in-law shows her brother some affection.
The benshi, Kataoka-san, told
me that Kaoru’s “jealousy face” had the audience at the 2009 Tokyo
International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival in stitches. Egawa’s film career seems to have just been
in the 1930s. In contrast to Egawa’s
melodramatics, Matsue Hisamatsu puts
in a more subtle performance as Miyoko, the object of Kaoru’s intense
affections. Hisamatsu’s film career was even
briefer than that of Egawa.

The best
actors in this film are Akira Kichōji
(credited under his real name of Mitsuhiko Okazaki) as Kaoru’s brother Mitsuo,
and Buman Kahara (also credited under his
real name of Keiji Ōizumi) as her father. Both men went on to have long and
varied careers as character actors. Kichōji’s best known films are Seven Samurai (1954), where he played one
of the farmers, and Japan’s Longest Day
(1967), while appeared in films such as Shōhei Imamura’s My Second Brother (1960) and Pigs
and Battleships (1961). With his
expressive face, Kichōji plays Mitsuo as a very charming man. However, the show-stealing performance of the
film is that of Kahara who opens the film with a hilarious slapstick bicycle
ride which would have been right at home in a Buster Keaton film.

The Cinematography

The real
star of Scent of Pheasant’s Eye for
me is the extremely innovative cinematography.
The film opens with a POV shot of Kaoru’s father, a town councillor,
coming home by bicycle. I am not sure how they shot it, but it does indeed look as though they mounted the camera on an actual bicycle. At first, the councillor's form of transportation is unclear, we only know that it is a bumpy ride and get
to enjoy, from his perspective, the bemused farmers’ greetings of this
well-known local figure. When we do
finally get to see a shot of him, it is played for comic effect. His way has been blocked and he berates
whoever is blocking his way. When the
camera finally widens the shot, we see that he has been telling off a cow
rather than a person. Such visual gags
are frequent in the film, giving us a welcome respite from Karou’s sometimes
over-the-top melodrama.

The unusual
framings of dialogue and action seem fresh and innovative for the time. By the mid-1930s in the USA, the classical
Hollywood style had largely been standardized and this film would have broken
all those rules. It seems surprising
that this film has remained hidden from international scholarship for decades. The cinematographer is Asakazu Nakai (中井朝一, 1901-88), who went on to become
a frequent collaborator of Akira
Kurosawa. The film gave me a thirst
to see more of his early work, as I have only seen the films for which his
cinematography is renowned, like Stray
Dog (1949), Ikiru (1952), Seven Samurai (1954), Throne of Blood (1957), High and Low (1963) and Ran (1985). In total, he made over 130 films in his long
and successful career, but his pre-war work has been little seen or written about.

The Director

Not a great
deal is known about the director Jirō
Kawate (川手二郎, b. 1904 – d. unknown). He was born in Nagano Prefecture and it is
said that his admiration for the renowned film and kabuki actor Bando Tsumasaburo (阪東妻三郎,
1901-53) inspired him to get into the film industry himself. He first worked as an extra, then as an
assistant director, before becoming a director in 1932 for Shinkō Kinema.

In 1936 he
moved to what is now Toho Studios, where he made several films of the genre Kulturfilm (文化映画 / Bunka eiga). He then returned to his hometown to work in
real estate, but nothing is known about his life since he retired from the film
industry.

Ichiro Kataoka’s benshi performance was, as always, stellar. He performed together with the Dutch silent
film pianist Kevin Toma. Toma and Kataoka met for the first time on
the day. They had a chance to talk to
each other beforehand and did a sound check together, but they did not rehearse
together. One could liken their
improvisational performance to jazz music.
Kataoka played off of the script that he wrote for the film in
2008. Much of the film’s dialogue was
preserved, but I noticed that he added his own interpretation to scenes. I have seen him perform in Germany with
projected subtitles of his script, but this film only had the NFC English subtitles of the title cards (done by the amazing husband and wife team Dean
Shimauchi), so non-speakers of Japanese missed out on some of the poetic
touches Kataoka brought to the film, such as his description of the changing
seasons. One moment that needed no
translation was his hilarious interpretation of a scene in which two deaf old
men play Go together but only have one ear trumpet to shout at
each other through.

The pianist,
Toma, does not play silent movie standards.
He composes his own music, improvises, and often adds themes from some of
his favourite composers. During this
performance he apparently used a melody from a piece by Toru Takemitsu. The film was consisted of three 35mm reels
that were on loan from the NFC but the cinema had only one projector, so Toma
had to improvise during the long reel changes. On the whole it was a lively performance much enjoyed by the audience.

Incidentally
after the performance I discovered that Kataoka is from Nerima (a ward in
Tokyo). This was a funny coincidence, I thought to myself, because Nerima is famous for its daikon radishes, and there is a memorable scene in The Scent of Pheasant’s Eye where Mitsuo
flirts with Miyoko as she washes a long row of daikon in the river. When I asked Kataoka about this, he laughed
and told me that The Scent of Pheasant’s
Eye was actuallyshot in Nerima and
because of this, he would be doing a benshi performance of the film in Nerima
next year. Keep your eyes open for the
event next year Tokyoites – it is worth watching!

13 July 2015

Fusako Yusaki (湯崎夫沙子, b.
1937) is a Japanese clay animation pioneer.
Most of the early independent Japanese animators who came of age in the
1960s are men. Women animators in this
period were often behind the scenes working as inbetweeners and assistant
animators and rarely took a directorial credit.
Yusaki is the exception to this rule, but she made her name not in Japan
but in Italy. Her works range from the
abstract to narrative works – though many combine elements of both. Using a colourful palette of clay, her works
are defined by her use of metamorphosis.
Scenes flow seamlessly into one another in a very organic style.

Yusaki was born in the city of Moji-ku,
one of the five cities that merged to create the city of Kitakyūshū in Fukuoka
Prefecture in 1963. She graduated with a
degree in Fine Arts from Joshibi University of Art and Design in 1960. She then won a scholarship to study at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in
Milan in 1964 and has lived and worked in Milan ever since.

She established her own independent
studio – Studio Yusaki (スタジオ・ユサキ) –
and is famous for her commercials and for her children’s television programming
in collaboration with public broadcasters such as RAI (Italy’s public
broadcaster) and the NHK. Yusaki rose to
fame in Italy in the 1960s for her popular series of clay animation
advertisements for the liqueur Fernet-Branca (1968-1977), for which she won the
Bagatto d’oro (the top prize for Italian
commercials) in 1971.

In the 1990s and 2000s, she became
known for her sweet clay animation characters such as Peo (ペオ) the blue dog and the red and blue figures Naccio + Pomm (ナッチョとポム). Naccio + Pomm have
been released by the NHK in Japan as part of their Petit Petit Anime (プチプチ・アニメ) series for kids.

Among her many honours, Yusaki has
won a Bronze Lion from the Festival
international de la créativité - Lions Cannes (1972) and the award for lifetime
achievement from the Festival
Internazionale del Cinema d'Arte in Bergano (2004). She has been on the international juries at many
festivals including Annecy (1989), Hiroshima (1990), Zagreb (2000), Espinho
(2002), and Wissembourg (2003).

Yusaki continues to be very active on the animation scene, teaching workshops and participating in festivals as well as making films. She teaches three-dimensional
illustration at l’Istituto Europeo di
Design in Milan and her films are part of the collection of the Hara Museum of Contemporary
Art in Tokyo.